Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I thank the hon. and learned Gentleman. That is the core of the problem with the negative procedure. The Government's defence has two aspects. First, the procedure is said to be cumbersome—but the response to that point was provided by the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson). The Government have said that there are only 30 treaties a year, and that they will be dealt with in fundamentally the same way as we deal with affirmative resolutions for statutory instruments, of which we deal with several a day—there is one about income tax on the Order Paper today—so this does not seem to be at all a good point for the Government to make. The procedure is not cumbersome in the least. For the second part of the Government's defence, the Minister gave a guarantee that in certain circumstances, if complaints were made about a treaty on the Floor of the House, the Government would use their power over the agenda of the House to make sure that a debate and a vote took place. The trouble with that defence is that it was later reduced to absurdity when the Minister said that he would accede even to the requests of Back Benchers, which immediately starts to contradict his first point. If anything would be cumbersome, it would be a system under which any Back Bencher could get 90 minutes on the Floor of the House any time they wanted to complain about something. I am afraid that that part of the defence does not work either. It seemed to me that the Minister was thrown back on to what might be called the "good chap" theory of the constitution—that we are all good chaps together and no one will exploit the power that this particular way of implementing intentions gives the Government. I am afraid that it is too late for the good chap theory of the constitution. If the whole purpose of the clause, and this part of the Bill, is to transfer power from the Government to Parliament, that transfer itself must be part of the Bill. What the Government cannot do is transfer a little bit so that the proposal does not work in reality—even though one wants it to work—and then say that otherwise Parliament can rely on the Government's good will. That is precisely the form of Government that we are trying to move away from; it relies on the use of the very prerogative that we are trying to undermine.